African safari

Kansas Silent Film Festival to show 'Simba,' the only surviving feature-length film Osa and Martin Johnson made during the silent era

Posted: Sunday, February 22, 2004

By By Bill BlankenshipThe Capital-Journal

As a girl, she dreamed of living in a home of her own in the southeastern Kansas town of Chanute where she would raise a family and tend a garden. As a woman, she planted sunflowers on the slopes of an African mountain and baked apple pies only hours after an epic flight over the jungles of Borneo.

Osa Martin was a study in contrasts, and audiences attending the eighth annual Kansas Silent Film Festival this weekend at Washburn University will get a glimpse into the extraordinary life of this Kansas native who with her husband, Martin Johnson, blazed trails in filmmaking and wildlife photography.

"Simba," the only surviving feature-length film the Johnsons made during the silent era, will be shown during the Saturday morning session of the festival, which begins Friday evening and continues through Saturday night at White Concert Hall.

In "They Married Adventure: The Wonderful Lives of Martin & Osa Johnson," the couple's biographers, Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperato, write that young Osa, who was born in Chanute, had just the right mix of influences to be open to the kind of adventure her life would become.

Photographs Courtesy Of Martin & Osa Johnson Safari Museum

Osa and Martin Johnson, pioneer filmmakers from Kansas, sit on the Serengeti Plains in this hand-tinted photograph.Osa and Martin Johnson, pioneer filmmakers from Kansas, sit on the Serengeti Plains in this hand-tinted photograph.

From her mother and grandmother, Osa "learned to sew and cook, bake bread and be resourceful," the Imperatos wrote. Osa's father "taught her to shoot, to fish in the nearby Neosho River, to coax the backyard garden into bloom, and to take pleasure in life at home."

However, Osa had another role model in the form of an aunt, who the Imperatos described as "a cigar-smoking circus performer who for many years worked as a bareback rider."

"Young Osa greatly admired her and was captivated by the exciting life she led," the biographers wrote.

And Osa had her own penchant for performing.

Photographs Courtesy Of Martin & Osa Johnson Safari Museum

Martin Johnson films while Osa Johnson keeps a lookout during the couple's 1924-27 trip to Africa, footage of which was used to make "Simba." That film will be shown Saturday morning at the Kansas Silent Film Festival.

"Graced with good looks, big brown eyes, curly flaxen hair, a soprano voice, and spunk leavened with a sweet disposition, she was a regular star at school entertainments," the Imperatos wrote.

Osa's opportunity for adventure came in the form of Martin, who seemed to be born with wanderlust.

Although his birthplace was Rockford, Ill., Martin was only a few months old when his family moved to Kansas, first to Lincoln, then to Independence. Young Martin often would run away to escape the wrath of his authoritarian father who couldn't seem to interest the boy in anything meaningful until he acquired for his variety store the Eastman-Kodak franchise.

"Martin's passion for the cameras and film was immediate and intense," the Imperatos wrote. That passion not only was for photography but also for the freedom it offered.

"That freedom seemed to be in those faraway exotic places evoked by the overseas shipments he unpacked in the store," the biography says. "It was not just the Venetian glass and Swiss clocks that stirred his imagination, but also the newspapers in which they were wrapped."

Martin's early travels were limited as he worked as an itinerant photographer making portraits in nearby southeastern Kansas towns. In fact, 7-year-old Osa wheedled 10 cents from her father to take her baby brother for a portrait by 16-year-old Martin, who she found curt and opinionated.

Photographs Courtesy Of Martin & Osa Johnson Safari Museum

In this scene from "Simba," Osa Johnson keeps an eye on a threatening lion with her rifle ready to shoot it if it charges.

In the intervening eight years before the two would meet again, Martin was expelled from school for some trick photography in which he made composite images of faculty members in romantic poses.

Although accounts differ as to how he got there, Martin managed to travel around the United States and to Europe. However, Martin's first true adventure came when he learned famed travelers and authors Jack and Charmian London were building a ship to sail around the world.

With a letter in which he embellished his experiences and skills, Martin managed to get the Londons to take him aboard their ship, the Snark, which they named after the Lewis Carroll poem.

Two years later, the severe illness of Jack London halted the Snark in the South Seas, but Martin returned to Kansas armed with enough photographs, film, objects and stories to tour as a travelogue lecturer.

That was how 16-year-old Osa and Martin, who was 9 1/2 years her senior, met again with the encouragement of Osa's best friend who was dating one of Martin's projectionists.

Although she didn't like Martin's show, she was smitten by him.

"To a teenager aspiring to be an actress, he was the ideal man," the Imperatos wrote. "Tall and handsome with gray-green eyes, he was an acclaimed world traveler who exuded appealing country boy manners."

Less than a month later, the two eloped and not long after that began the first of their many journeys together. Their first trips were on the vaudeville circuit, sharing bills with Will Rogers, W.C. Fields and other entertainers of the day.

They also used this time to make financial contacts and learn the entertainment business until Martin secured the backing needed to return to the South Seas. Although the Johnsons filmed many scenes of South Pacific islanders and their surroundings, it was footage of their encounter with the Big Nambas, a tribe that had a reputation for capturing Europeans who never were seen again alive.

Whether the Big Nambas were toying with the Johnsons or meant them harm, the film footage of their encounter and escape became "Cannibals of the South Seas" (1918), which delivered what theater-goers sought.

Photographs Courtesy Of Martin & Osa Johnson Safari Museum

The image of a lioness is captured by the still photography of Osa Johnson, who became a renowned wildlife photographer in her own right.

"The combination of the exotic, dangerous savages, and courageous Midwesterners filled the bill perfectly, and for the rest of their lives, Martin and Osa played the parts they first created for themselves in their New Hebrides adventure," the Imperatos wrote.

After exploring the South Seas and Borneo with their cameras, the Johnsons turned their attention to Africa, encouraged to do so by the famous naturalist Carl Akeley. Akeley helped the Johnsons secure the backing of the American Museum of Natural History for their second and longest African stay from 1924 to 1927. In was during this time the footage for "Simba" was shot.

While scholars and researchers to this day use the film and photographs made by the Johnsons as a historically accurate representation of Africa at the time, "Simba" was a commercial film meant to get people to dig into their pockets to buy tickets.

And one thing producer Daniel E. Pomeroy insisted on having in the film was a lion-spearing sequence on the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania even if it meant trucking Lumbwa (Kipsigis) men with spears from Narok in Kenya to do the spearing.

In "They Married Adventure," the Imperatos say the filmmakers "used automobiles to block routes of escape and to drive lions into the open, and employed experienced, paid actors who performed on cue."

That a museum would endorse this contrivance "was justified on the grounds that a permanent film record of a vanishing custom could only be made through reenactment," the biography says.

However, the public was never told this in the film. Instead, for dramatic purposes, "Simba's" intertitles describe how marauding lions attack the Lumbwa's herd of cattle, killing the "king's" prize bull. A group of recently circumcised young men are erroneously described as priest sent into exile after their incantations fail to drive away the lions.

"In an attempt to infuse humor and build up suspense, a group of circumcised young women are, equally inaccurately, presented as a consignment of wives for the beleagured 'king,' obviously arriving at an inopportune time," the biographers write.

Although Osa, a crack shot, did save Martin's life from charging animals with her marksmanship, the penultimate sequence of "Simba" in which she fells a charging lion also is a product of deft editing.

Modern viewers used to "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" standards might be offended by "Simba." Others will find offensive the film's racial stereotyping, but the Imperatos suggest people must remember the prevailing attitudes of the time when the Johnsons lived and worked.

A commercial plane crash in California killed Martin in 1937 at age 52. Osa would go on to lecture, produce films and write, including her best-selling memoirs, "I Married Adventure."

Osa died of a heart attack in New York City in 1953. She was 58. Her body was buried alongside Martin's remains back in Kansas, in her hometown of Chanute.

And, the Imperatos wrote:

"All across the country, the little girl who had once collected pretty rocks and leaves on the Kansas prairie was remembered as an intrepid and courageous woman. She had inspired the young, affirmed the values of her era, and forever changed America's vision of the exotic and far away."

Bill Blankenship can be reached at (785) 295-1284 or bill.blankenship@cjonline.com.